Thalestris was not the only “Amazon” linked with Alexander. Accounts by Curtius and Arrian, a respected second-century AD historian of Alexander’s campaigns, might help shed some light on the identity of Thalestris. In 328 BC while in Sogdiana and Baktria (now Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan), Alexander received a message from a distant “European Scythian” king, who offered precious gifts and his daughter in marriage as a pledge of friendship; the king also hinted that he would send Alexander’s most trusted companions Scythian wives too. According to Curtius, Alexander had sent a messenger named Derdas to this king who ruled “beyond the Bosporus.” (In about 331 BC, Scythians in this area had defeated and killed Alexander’s general Zopyrion.) When Derdas returned with the king’s offer of a marriage alliance, Alexander declined. These accounts seem related to the marriage offer described in Alexander’s letter to Antipater, above. Some modern scholars wonder whether this Scythian princess might have been the basis of the story of Thalestris.20
Around the same time, the “king of Khorasmia” arrived with fifteen hundred horsemen and met with Alexander. He declared that “his country shared a border with the Amazons and Colchis.” Arrian says that the king offered to guide Alexander’s army “should he wish to attack the Amazons and subdue all the Scythian tribes as far as the Black Sea.” Khorasmia/Khorezm was located between the (now dry) Aral Sea and the Karakum (Black Sand) Desert. The ancient oral epics of this region featured many women warriors (Chapter 24). By “Colchis” the king probably meant “Amazon-land” playing upon the Greeks’ fantasies about mythic Amazons. From the Aral Sea west to the Black Sea would be a very long march. It is likely that by “Amazons” the king was referring to his warlike neighbors the Massagetae, Saka-Scythians, and related tribes in the Central Asia-Altai region, where numerous burials of women with weapons and tattooed frozen mummies have been discovered (Chapter 4). Parts of Inner Asia were called “lands of women” in Indian and Chinese texts (Chapters 24 And 25). Arrian’s account underscores how little the Greeks knew about Central Asian geography. Some thought the Caspian Sea was part of the Sea of Azov, and that the Caucasus Mountains were somehow contiguous with the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, and therefore they believed that Baktria was not so distant from the Black Sea.21
In 327 BC, Alexander encountered another warrior queen, Cleophis. Her name means “Famous Snake” in Greek, likely a translation of her real Sanskrit or Avestan name. Cleophis led an army of horsemen and -women (twenty thousand cavalry and thirty-eight thousand infantry) against the Macedonians at Massaga. These people were the Ashvakas (Sanskrit, “Horse People”) of the Swat and Buner valleys in the Hindu Kush (Afghanistan-Pakistan-northern India; see chapter 24). The battle was bloody and long, and the women fought as valiantly as the men. Alexander was wounded, and Cleophis captured. The sources disagree on the details of the close fighting, the battle’s outcome, and the terms of the treaty. The ancient rumor that Queen Cleophis (who was over the age of fifty) bore Alexander’s son appears to have arisen because she named one of her sons—more likely, her grandson—“Alexander” in gratitude for his compassion after the battle.22
Six years after his liaison with Thalestris, in summer of 324 BC, Alexander was back in Media after the arduous Indian campaigns. From here Alexander made a special trip to see the famous Nisaean Plain, the pastures of grass and clover in western Iran where once as many 150,000 celebrated Nisaean horses used to graze (above, and chapter 11). Marauding nomads had captured so many after his defeat of Persia that now only a third of them remained. Then, reported Arrian, “they say that Atropates, satrap of Media, sent 100 horsewomen that he called Amazons to Alexander. The women were armed with battle-axes and small shields and dressed in the traditional Amazon fashion. Some said that their exposed right breasts appeared smaller. But it is said that Alexander dismissed this cavalry from his army, fearing that their presence might incite his Greek and barbarian soldiers to molest them. They also say that Alexander told the warrior women to inform their queen that he would later pay a visit to beget children by her.” Curtius added that the horsewomen’s equipment “led some to believe that they were survivors of the race of Amazons.”23 The frequency of phrases like “they say” and “it is said” signals the legendary nature of the incident, and Alexander’s promise to impregnate their queen could allude to or reflect an alternative version of the Thalestris incident. Arrian pointed out that Aristobulus, Ptolemy, and other “reliable witnesses” failed to record this event. The location is not that far from Hyrcania. Was this story conflated in oral retellings with the account of Thalestris and her three hundred Amazons.?
Arrian was a Greek native of Bithynia on the western border of Pon-tus, the Amazons’ legendary homeland. He wrote his history in the second century AD, during the reigns of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian, long after any living warrior women had been sighted in Pon-tus. Yet Arrian stated that he believed Amazons had existed in the past because so many distinguished ancient writers, such as Herodotus and the Athenian orators, had described them. To explain the “Amazon” cav-alrywomen presented to Alexander, Arrian surmised that they “belonged to some barbarian tribe and had been taught to ride and were exhibited [by Atropates] dressed in Amazon fashion.”24
From his vantage point during the Roman Empire, at a time when emperors dressed their girlfriends as “Amazons” and female gladiators pretending to be Amazons re-created mythic duels from the Trojan War, Arrian’s explanation made sense. In 61 BC, in his triumphal parade after the Mithradatic Wars, the Roman general Pompey had displayed some genuine Scythian women warriors captured in Caucasian Albania (chapter 21). A century later, the emperor Nero surrounded himself with a personal entourage of concubines with short hair, dressed in Amazon garb and carrying battle-axes and light shields. The emperor Commodus outfitted his concubine Marcia (“Warlike,” from the Roman war god Mars) as an Amazon to fight as a gladiator in the arena; Commodus also sealed letters with his signet ring depicting an Amazon, and he renamed the month of December “Amazonius.” Arrian himself described mythic battle reenactments, staged for entertainment, by Roman cavalrymen wearing trousers and parade helmets with lifelike Amazon face masks. In 2000, archaeologists excavating a Roman cemetery in London announced that the remains of a gladiator appeared to be those of a female. An inscribed sculpted relief from the time of Arrian, discovered in Halicarnassus in 1846 (now in the British Museum), is even more conclusive. It shows a pair of bare-breasted gladiatrixes with greaves and shields fighting with short swords. Their noms de guerre, “Amazon” and “Achillia,” suggest that they impersonated Achilles and Penthesilea, a popular mythic subject in Roman art.25
But these derivative “Amazon” entertainers became popular in the Roman era several centuries after Alexander, in a very different world. If a cavalry unit of armed females was shown to Alexander in the fourth century BC in what is now northern Iran, it is not out of the question that they could have been authentic women warriors from a nomadic tribe allied with the Median king.26
The body of legends (attributed to Pseudo-Callisthenes) dating from the third century BC (Greek version) to the fourth to sixth centuries AD (Armenian and other versions) known collectively as the Alexander Romance contains many spurious letters supposedly written by Alexander.
In this imaginary correspondence, Alexander exchanged letters with the warrior queen Candace of Meroe (Nubia, now Sudan, whose independent queens were called Candace/Kandake in antiquity; see chapter 23). Alexander also communicated with Amazons who lived on a magically large island in a wide, dangerous river at “the edge of the world.” He wrote to request a meeting. The gist of their reply reads: “We are armed virgins, 270,000 strong; no male creatures dwell on our island. Once a year we sacrifice a horse and for six days we visit the men who live across the river for sex and children; we raise the girls. If an enemy invades our land we send our female cavalry force of 120,000 to the borders and our men take up the rear. We reward valor with honors, gold, and silver. If we Amazons defeat a foe, they are humiliated forever. But if men were to conquer us, they can only boast of defeating women. So beware, Alexander.” Alexander “smiled” and wrote back, urging the women “and your men” to present themselves and pay tribute. He proposed that they send him a band of horsewomen to serve in his cavalry each year, to be paid in gold. In this tale, the Amazon leaders held an assembly and decided to send Alexander an annual tribute of one hundred talents of gold, one hundred fine horses, and one hundred of their bravest warrior maidens, who were to return as virgins, but “those who have sex with your soldiers may remain with you.”27
As the Greeks expanded their worldview to include Central Asia, the vision of mythic Amazons kept receding before them, just over the horizon, behind the next mountain range, in the foothills ringing the green valleys, beyond the desert wilderness. Alexander and his men were steeped in Greek myths of illustrious heroes interacting with Amazons at the fringes of civilization. He and his army had stopped in Halicarnassus in Caria to marvel at the new, spectacular Mausoleum that Artemesia II had decorated with scenes of Amazons battling Greeks (Chapter 19). They also met powerful female rulers—for example, Queen Ada (sister of Artemisia II), who became a close friend of Alexander; he made her the satrap of Caria. According to Arrian, one of Alexander’s role models for his conquests was Queen Semiramis, who was said to have campaigned in Baktria and India (Chapters 12, 22, 23).28
Reports and firsthand sightings of actual horsewomen in nomad attire with bows and battle-axes, so similar to the images of Hippolyte, Penthesilea, and all the other Amazons in ancient Greek vase paintings and sculpture, confirmed the reality of Amazons and kept alive the expectation of observing living examples. The written accounts of Alexander’s encounters with Amazons were debated in antiquity and took on the trappings of legend. But the consistent realistic details in those stories and the continuing discussions about their truth in antiquity provide fascinating evidence of just how deeply embedded the prickly, enticing idea of Amazons was for the Greeks. That a bold, adventurous man might hope to find a companion in an equally strong woman of action was a perennially thrilling prospect. And just maybe, for Alexander and his men, it became a reality, at least for thirteen days and nights.
Of all the ancient historians, only Justin felt the need to wrap up the incomplete story of the Amazon queen Thalestris; he says she died not long after returning to her homeland. Alexander himself would also die in a few years’ time and never returned to his homeland. The next historical figure of antiquity who enjoyed a relationship with an Amazon was King Mithradates VI of Pontus, who lived into his seventies. Not only did his Amazon lover outlive him, but her existence is not in doubt.
World History
